th the exception of golf and
bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl-run at its
hardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.

It refused to materialise.

The only progress I achieved was with my villain.

I drew him from the professor, and made him a blackmailer. He had
several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was the
thing he did really well.

It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen
in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better result
than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little paradise on
the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green woods. I had not
been there for some time, owing principally to an entirely erroneous
idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a straight hard chair
at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea wind in my eyes.

But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from my
room. In the drawing-room below the gramophone was dealing brassily
with "Mister Blackman." Outside the sun was just thinking of setting.
The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does Kipling say?

"And soon you will find that the sun and the wind
And the Djinn of the Garden, too,
Have lightened the hump, Cameelious Hump,
The Hump that is black and blue."

His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I
could omit that. The sun and the wind were what I needed.

I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path
along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.

To reach my favourite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left,
and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the
narrow path.

I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the
same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis
entered in from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.

CHAPTER XVII

OF A SENTIMENTAL NATURE

She was wearing a panama, and she carried a sketching-block and
camp-stool.

"Good evening," I said.

"Good evening," said she.

It is curious how different the same words can sound, when spoken by
different people. My "good evening" might have been that of a man with
a particularly guilty conscience caught in the act of doing something
more than usually ignoble. She spoke like a rather offended angel.

"It's a lovely evening," I went